CMake Python Wheels

CMake, the cross-platform build system generator, is now easily installable in Python distributions! This makes creation of cross-platform C/C++ CPython extension modules accessible to many more developers.

The official package manager for Python, pip, is available with both Python 2.7 and the recent Python 3. Of course, CMake can also be installed via installers from cmake.org, package managers like apt, Homebrew, or Conda, and it is shipped with developer tools like Visual Studio. And, like the CMake Python Distribution, it is open source, so it can be built from source with any C++ compiler.

For more information on the CMake Python Distribution, documentation is available on Read The Docs.

For commercial support in building and packaging your C/C++ extension, please reach out to us at kitware@kitware.com.

5 Responses to CMake Python Wheels

Is it just to have another way to download CMake or is it a way to add ability to use CMake from Python?

I really hope I’m wrong about this but looking at the python package source, I couldn’t find an effective way to call CMake from Python. I saw that the python package has a cmake() function but it only seems to call cmake using the command line arguments. This means that if I wanted to use CMake to build Python CExtensions in my setup.py this wouldn’t work.

That’s a shame but thanks for the link. I glanced at scikit-build a while back but I remember that was overwhelmed by it. This is why I got excited about this, thinking it would have been a simpler approach to adding CMake to Python. Oh well. I can’t fault you for having another goal with your project. I’ll take another look at scikit-build